My Drive relabled itself and died

I have two Western Digital 160 GB hard drives. One is ATA & the other IDE.
They used to have very similer model #'s until I tried to boot this morning.
The ATA (still working) is # "WDC WD1600JS-22MHBO" & the IDE drive That
(Still shows, but says has 1mb used and 1mb free, and is not working) and was named
"WDC WD1600JB-******" is now called "GDC GD!6 0JB REA"? All my programs are on that
Drive, I lost my 500gig external backup the day before (Probaly to the same demons)
and all my serails and keys were stored there. That drive is making strange noises. what
if anything can be done? And what happened? Thank you for your time, Scott K.

 

Greetings, skelly3993.

I'd suggest downloading and running any diagnostics tools that Western Digital might offer - the Lifeguard Tools and Diagnostics are listed on MG, but you might also check the Western Digital site for additional tools, Knowledge Base articles, etc.

Have you been having any malware-related problems, power hits, any other symptoms?

 

I'm afraid every time I've come across a hard drive with a scrambled name it's meant it's damaged beyond repair . You can follow Caliban's advice to see if you can at least get the information from it, but I suspect it may already be too late.

I'm concerned that you've lost two hard drives in a short space of time, but I can't think of any reason they would be related. One's subjected to heat while the other isn't, one's dealing with the internal vibrations that the other isn't, one's connected via USB while the other isn't, and so on. The only thing that could connect the two would be if they both suffered direct damage - perhaps someone knocked your tower over? Or you had an extremely powerful magnet you were playing with? Or lightning struck your house? I suspect you just got very unlucky and it's a sad coincidence.

 

And the strange noises are usually "death rattles".

 

Thank you all for your input and yes I have been having trouble with malicious software. Ever since I upgraded from fix-it utilities version 10 to fix-it utilities version 11 and ran their driver genius disk I've been having problems everywhere until the hard drive just got tired of me working trying to fix it I guess? The storage drive the USB 500 GB acted like it was writing to bad clusters so I ran my SpinRite expensive utility and it never ran again. Although it did find bad clusters I pretty much lost them all running level f number four. My boot drive though I thought I had repaired all the damage shut it down and went to bed. The next morning it couldn't find an active drive to boot from. It's not an very old drive probably less than a year. Does anybody know what causes this labeling change?

 

I think the labelling change is caused by damage to the drive's controller board but that's just an under-educated guess

Never a good idea to run random utilities to 'fix' errors that may not exist, always run diagnoses to pinpoint the problem before selecting the best software for the job.

 

None of these programs caused the clicking within the recently broken hard drive. The clicking is from a physical defect or damage and simply cannot be caused by a program. It's just a horrible coincidence.

As for the external hard drive, it is *possible* that the SpinRite program incorrectly diagnosed the hard drive and then screwed it up by writing things in places it shouldn't. However this would have to be a really Bad program to have done all that, but after a little research I see that it isn't , and I wouldn't hold it responsible. However it doesn't sound like a particularly good program, and as you paid for it, you may want to show around for alternatives. Here's an admittedly old review:
http://www.myharddrivedied.com/weblog/why_spinrite_is_not_on_my_d.html

 

Spinrite was like a god amongst the peasants back in the 286 days. Ya, crap does happen no matter what one does, look what happened to MG's download section, it was statistically near impossible to lose all that data yet it happened. As soon as one hears the 'death rattle' starting then back it up straight away and never trust the drive again....and yes a relabeled drive is a dead drive as I've seen a couple.